


Dancefloor: Don’t Tell Me I Only Ever Walked Like a Human Soul

by thatsrightdollface



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Spoilers, headcanons, spoilers up to volume 6/the side stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 19:56:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14432967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: What Dionysus traded, for his frenzied, neon gospel.And then… After we talk about THAT…  A dream.





	Dancefloor: Don’t Tell Me I Only Ever Walked Like a Human Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Hi~ Thanks for clicking on this fic! I hope you enjoy it, if you read.
> 
> Honestly… I’ve been working on this off and on since I finished volume 6… Ahhh, I really hope it came out okay. It’s meant to be something of a tribute? I have a lot of feelings about Dio’s arc… Sorry for anything I got wrong.
> 
> (I didn’t tag for “Major Character Death” ‘cause I wanted to avoid spoilers for people who wouldn’t have clicked on this once they read the “spoilers up to volume 6!!!” tag… But I do deal a lot with what happens to Dio, including talk of different sorts of death. Please be aware!!) 
> 
> Also: thank you, again and I hope you have a great day~

I. “The Dancefloor that Walks like a Man”

 

To start with, Dionysus traded his life.  He didn’t think it was as strange as he might have, if he’d been the only one doing it.  We’re talking about a Pantheon thing, though: at the time, he’d been full of wonder.  He’d thought it couldn’t be helped – he had been chosen, and told who he was.  

Dio traded quiet walks where no strangers screamed for him, and he traded the human name he’d worn his whole life.  Worn without any kind of godly expectations: flesh-and-blood name, phone-contact name.   He passed being “Umar”— (with his scarves and crisp jackets, designated driver for a couple laughing friends) – over like bills out of a wallet.  Like concert tickets, like one of those free hugs Baal teased him for offering.  He traded away all the simple humanity printed on his IDs – _(blood_ _type and allergies; day job and driver’s license number.  You know) –_ and told himself that it would be worth something good in the end.  He would make it something good. 

He became “Dionysus,” to the world, and Dionysus got a newfound spinning-neon divinity in exchange for his human self.  He got a laurel wreath tattooed on his scalp; he got the Pantheon, and a purpose.  So, so many souls that needed him.  See?  It would have been worse, if he’d been alone.  

And whatever Dio’s name was, hadn’t he always wanted to be useful – wanted to raise people up?  Somehow…  Encouraging them in internet chatrooms, maybe, or letting them cut ahead of him in supermarket lines.  Picking them up sopping wet on the side of the road.  And now, as “Dionysus,” he could raise up nearly anyone who’d let him into his dancing frenzied hivemind –  into release and cleansing madness and revelry.  With a brush of his drugged-up chemical skin.  With a flash of a smile – bright, bright teeth in the blacklight – and the pounding of music. 

All his epiphanies needed was for his newly devout to just

Let

Go

And trust him.

Right?

Trust him to keep them safe through it all.  To usher them out into the world after they’d been very nearly part of his soul – the wine-god’s soul and Umar’s at the same, same time.   He’d hand them their coats, then, maybe, and make sure they remembered to take their medication.  That is, if they _wanted_ the party to end, and went willingly…  Which some of them never did.  Some of his congregation danced for blurry weeks on weeks on weeks, and then they camped on the sticky rotten floor waiting for him to start that frenzy up again.  Dio knew no one could see how bloodshot and raw his eyes were becoming unless he decided to show them.  He’d become the designated driver for a whole bleary dancehall, and he felt so guilty whenever he had to pull over the car.  

Dionysus kept on pinning smiley face buttons to his shirts, just like before, though; he spilled as much love as he could into his madcap congregation’s e-mail newsletter.  He reminded himself that worry – like sleep – was something he could save for death.  He wanted to become whatever his newfound Bacchae needed him to be, at first.  That was part of handing over his human self, he’d imagined.

(And you know, the original Dionysus, way back in those long-ago Grecian revelries with wine sticky on everybody’s fingers and staining their mouths like dark goth Morrigan-on-the-tracks lipstick, _he_ had traded his humanity, too.  Traded his name.  “Dionysus” meant “the God of Nysa,” after all – and he hadn’t always been god of anything at all.  He’d been somewhat human, at first.  Semele’s son, born of Zeus but left to the wilds, and he had worn a human name.  

That brought Umar – _Dionysus_ – comfort, sometimes.  When he thought about all the human things that first Dionysus had been, before his godhood.  _His_ most secret insecurities; _his_ most guilty wants.  Because it made him feel less alone inside his own role, inside his too-crowded head, probably.  All those other souls living in his mindscape as if it had become their own self…  Not only his but theirs, too, theirs, theirs and always so –)

Unending?

Yeah. 

Dio had believed his mind could be _unending_ for them, could be whatever they asked.  No matter what ached, no matter what other members of the Pantheon told him in gentle, scolding voices.

To start with, Dionysus traded his life, and his human name.   Everyone in the Pantheon did _that_.

But that wasn’t all he’d traded.  One by one, Dionysus let things drop off him like jewelry into the sand, dancing at a bacchanalia under swaying branches, by Odysseus’s wine-dark sea.  Jewelry to be trampled, to be changed by pounding feet and waves and time.  He traded sleep, so he never dreamt of anything at all.  His subconscious was poured into the mania, into the movement.  Poured out like wine for everybody to drink. 

He traded his time, and his skin, so it sagged under the eyes and felt itchy all the time.  He traded his rage, offered up to the Destroyer and her underworld army.  He traded his friendship to everyone who came to him in honest worship – he promised them all the rest of his life, if it would make his time on earth matter, and if it meant he was what they needed from him.  Would these people have smiled at him, if he said _“Hey, excuse me,”_ on the street?  Would these people have even cared what his human name was, or wanted anything at all for him if he were still just a man?

 It couldn’t matter.  Dionysus couldn’t let little things like that get to him, could he?  He was the Dancefloor that Walked like a Man: that was part of his gospel, and so he felt he had to make it truth.  He had always thought, even as a human soul, that people would give him the same sort of kindness he offered them.  And that first Dionysus, long ago…  With the tangled soft hair and knowing smiles, you remember…  _He’d_ been conceived by a human, too.  He’d been human once, just the same as Dio _(Umar)_ had been.  And look what he’d become! 

Look what he’d become, when the world was young and the cycle of gods and death, gods and death to fend of the Darkness, had somehow not even begun.

That was the start of things:

Both the young gods, and the trading of a life.

 

 II. Raise Them Up, Raise Them Up, Raise –

               

He had known, sort of.  What was happening, what was coming for him, even before that enormous concert went wrong and all the lights burnt out.  Dionysus had known somewhere deep inside himself, where he still remembered his human national insurance number and the characters he’d most wanted to be like as a child.  Where he admitted the way he loved Cassandra Igarashi…  (Her stern, honest expressions and wry sense of humor, her practicality and her raw, self-conscious kindness…)  Even though of course he knew she dated women; of course he never would’ve asked her to want him back in that way he knew couldn’t have been fair.  If Dio’d been able to usher her into his hivemind, maybe Cass could’ve felt how important their friendship was to him just the way they were.

(She said that his hivemind was beautiful, before the end.  Beautiful, when she tasted just a little of it for the first time, though Dionysus didn’t hear her.)

Cassandra had tried to call off the concert.  She’d been worried _it_ might be coming for him, after all, and Gentle Annie had crooned down a breathless, giggly warning as she cupped his head in her so-cold hand.  There wasn’t much of Dionysus left.  He’d thought there would be enough, believed it so wildly, so graspingly, but by the time Woden took Dio’s act he knew deep in his bones that he was a well running dry.  He could only pray he would last as long as he needed to, even if it was a prayer to his own self – just like when Dionysus acted the role of his own priest in Euripides’s play.  Funny, how it all came back.

 _“I can save everyone,”_ Dionysus thought, and it was all force of will and prayer and the energy to unravel a room full of desperate, wanting minds.  To make them happy, for a little while, and keep them happy as long as he could.

Dio didn’t have a lot of one-on-one time with his own subconscious, now that his head was so busy with other people’s voices.  But the truest parts of him – where he’d first realized his asexuality, as natural as the warmth in his blood; where he’d first tasted what it was to connect with another living soul, nevermind thousands – suspected, and kept on just the same.  He knew it was getting difficult to breathe, after all; he knew his eyes had been going hazy around the edges for a long time, now.

And that was it.  That was _it_ coming for him, but he didn’t believe it, yet – _couldn’t let himself believe it_ – and so he rose up again and again.  It could never be said Dionysus traded away his godhood easily.  That was the last thing he had left to trade, after all.  That and his own mind, pulled so thin and exhausted it plucked apart like gum stretched between your fingers.

Woden wanted to fill all those thousands of Maenad-wild throats with his own voice; he wanted to turn the dancing into something crueler, making puppets of the faithful.  Dionysus realized too late, and waking up to find his own mindscape had become a stranger to him was eerier than anything he’d ever known.  Cass and her Norns captured, and his followers bound to Woden’s control – his marching, saluting, thousand-voiced control. 

Whatever Dionysus knew in those human places, those deep, honest places, he thought just the same way as he always had: _“I need to push myself harder.”_

Another energy drink, another dip into the blurring souls and pounding bassline of his revelry.  Another, another, another.  That was the way it had always been, but now –

It was too late.  There was no more self to force into action.  Worn away, brittle, glitching between god and man.  No more self at all.  Dionysus had known it was possible, but that wasn’t the same as belief, the same as surrender.  He had always been just a person, too: beneath the divinity, beneath the dancefloor.  A man, praying for the strength to stand one more time.  He called himself “Dio,” in those last moments.  Dionysus flickered and then dragged himself back up until he was sugar dissolving into yet another cup of coffee.  Umar went with him, although that name had been traded away first of all.

The party at the end of the world was over, at least for that cycle.  For that human, earnest lifetime.  Someone would stack the chairs up, later, and scrub all the muck off the floor.

And there it is:

Traded away, piece by piece.

But then?

But then, Dionysus might not have known what happened next.  We do, though: the same Cassandra that he’d learned to love woke, and she defended him.  Screamed fury and something like heartbreak, because he had been kind.  Because he’d been her friend, and she’d told him to be careful with his own breakable self.  Cass drove Woden back, and she learned a few of his secrets, and she had Dio brought to a too-clean place that had never heard his spinning, breathless music.  A hospital, where the nurses would have to decide whether to write “Dionysus” or his traded-away human name on all their clipboards.  “Umar,” yes, but what had his last name been? 

They could find it on his phone, if they wanted to: Dionysus wasn’t the sort who used password-protection, letting so many people into his actual head the way he did.  They could ask Trish, or Linda, his laughing friends from that other, simpler life.  Dio still texted them whenever he remembered.  Whenever he could break away.

Cassandra squeezed his hand in that hospital when she could get there, and daydreamed (despite her skeptic’s soul) that he might squeeze hers back.  That Dionysus might prop himself up in that bed, looking woozy, his smile shaky as his caffeine-rattling hands.  And she might shove him gently back against the pillows and say, _“Oh no you don’t.  You’re resting, Dio.  Please…  I’m serious, this time.”_

He hadn’t sat up, yet, but Cassandra knew that if Dio had been sitting vigil at someone _else’s_ bedside with her, he might have said: _“Oh, but that doesn’t mean he won’t.  It can still be okay, Cass!”   _

It’s not over ‘til it’s over.

Cassandra didn’t believe that this – what had happened to Dionysus, what they had all known _could_ happen to Dionysus, only a matter of when – was going to be okay at all.  She believed the hospital bed would hold her friend just like any meat; Dio wouldn’t feel the softness, or know if the balloons Cass brought him had smiley faces on them so she felt stupid carrying them in the hallway.  He would be a hollow thing, without any of the wonder and giving he’d traded his humanity for.

But let’s remember that first Dionysus, shall we?  Maybe a god on Olympus could keep going forever and always – maybe Dionysus and Ariadne could swim in a hazy electric dreaming for all time if they wanted to.  So let’s dream, the way Dio might have dreamt once there were no more dancefloors to light, no more minds to spin into bacchanalia.  No one left to save.

Just one dream, one of many.  Like traded away names; like gods, like cycles, like lives flickered out after so much struggle to _rise_. 

 

 III. Godhood

               

Mt. Olympus is a sprawling place.  It has so many faces – it would have to, what with all the stories stuffed inside it, and all the human minds trying to coax it to life again and again and again. 

But we can pick one for now: sheer ethereal cliffs and mist like dripping lace, maybe, full of light bleeding from Apollo’s sun chariot.  Wine would pool like blood from a wound in all the cups, there, if only Dionysus asked it to…  And vines would strangle the mountainside as he climbed the pathway back home.  Satyrs would call his name, scrambling out of their thick wild forests; his family would be waiting on their eleven godly thrones, and one left empty for him.  His brother Hermes might wave, swinging those fancy winged shoes of his so they chimed against the chair legs…  His sister Artemis might tease – might ask him why he’d taken so long.

Or maybe not.  Maybe Olympus was an empty, waiting dancehall, ready to be lit up with the sway and neon-burning ribbons of Dionysus’s mind as though nothing had ended at all.  Those different sorts of vines, right?  Soul and light and dancing.  The floors would be polished like amber, but nothing dead would be waiting inside, no.  No dead bugs trapped in ancient sap; no souls staring out from behind cold, unmoving skin.  Nothing would be _dead_ at all – nothing could be, in a place like that. 

Or maybe Olympus was some guy’s room, this time, with photographs on the wall and a secret mess kicked under the bed.  Old cracked CDs;  love letters never sent.  A collection of smiley face buttons in a jar, in case the one currently being worn around got lost, or had its smile scuffed away under somebody’s shoe.  Painfully safe and gentle and human, like that voice whispering all Dio’s truths deeper than his bones.  Maybe Zeus and Hera were waiting there, or maybe someone Umar had known, who would be happy to see him.  

Maybe. 

Whatever the case – it doesn’t matter –

We can watch as that ancient, first Dionysus draws this new man – the man that is him, and still someone other than him – back to Olympus.  Back to the laughing wine-gods that came before, and died in their fire-crackling Roman chambers or splattered into unintelligible Cubist prophesy.  We can watch as they walk together, two sets of footprints down the ageless, uncannily radiant god-halls – or across the beach where Dionysus first met his Ariadne – or up the stairs to a familiar flat.  Different footprints, but belonging to the very same self…  And not the same self at all.  It’s strange for them both, I’m sure, but it barely matters to the dreaming. 

Umar is Dionysus, but Dionysus is not Umar.  Dionysus is so many others, too, and before all that he is his own human name.  Whatever Semele had wanted to call him, maybe, before her fate came to get her.

That first Dionysus might offer a hug.  Might try to make his new self laugh.  They _were_ the same in so many ways, after all.  He might say, _“You served them as well as you could, and they knew you loved them – they had to know.  Come home, okay?”_

And maybe our Dio sways a little, his bones feeling heavier than they ever have before.  Maybe he asks if it’s alright to sleep, now, and his voice feels far away, and he hears the rumble of doctors talking but doesn’t hear it at the exact same time.  The beep of a life support machine, steady and sterile, colder than cold, the monitor like a thin red neon thread tying him to the waking world.  Like one of his own vines of light and soul and revelry, barely holding on – ripped from the soil.  He can’t know Cass is squeezing his hand, but he _can_ feel Dionysus leading him inside – into that Olympus, whatever it is, and all the warmth and light and change lying just beyond it.  Dionysus saying, _“Hah.  Of course!  Sleep anywhere. What’s mine is yours, right?”_

It’s a thought, anyway.  It’s a dream.  Maybe it’s Dionysus’s (Umar’s?) dream, as he stretches beyond the empty meat and off to whatever comes next.  Maybe it’s Cass’s as she stands by the bed, a coffee in her hand…  Or a warm energy drink she’s just brought from Dio’s car and doesn’t have the heart to throw out yet…  Or a form the doctors have given her to sign.


End file.
